A searing portrait of a mother’s grief and strength in the wake of unthinkable tragedy. On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s beloved twenty-three year old son Hersh was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love – and, in that moment, her life was forever separated into The Before and The After. Over the next eleven months, she and her husband Jon would work tirelessly – in public and behind the scenes – to secure the hostages’ release, to breathe some humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage;crisis. And when Hersh and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost. In “There are days when I break completely,” she writes. “I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn’t think it was physically possible, but the weeping never let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hoping I would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whisper of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us.”

Autorentext

Rachel Golberg-Polin, born and raised in Chicago, is a Jewish educator who lives in Jerusalem. She and her husband Jon are the parents of three children.